Serials crisis

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The term serials crisis describes the problem of rising subscription costs of serial publications, especially scholarly journals, outpacing academic institutions' library budgets and limiting their ability to meet researchers' needs. The prices of these institutional or library subscriptions have been rising much faster than inflation for several decades,^[1][2] while the funds available to the libraries have remained static or have declined in real terms. As a result, academic and research libraries have regularly canceled serial subscriptions to accommodate price increases of the remaining subscriptions.^[3][4] The increased prices have also led to the increased popularity of shadow libraries.^[5]